“Nonsense. I am perfectly fine.” But Great-aunt Agatha’s words lacked their usual crisp diction, and she was bending over sideways in her seat.

Prosper said, without any hint of haste, “This meeting is now adjourned. Karolus, Alex, give me a hand. Cora, make an emergency call.”

“Where to?”

“Sylva Commensals, of course. This is their responsibility.”

Karolus said, “Ha! Sylva. Trillions in damages,” and went at once to Agatha’s other side.

Alex was slower to move. He had been watching his mother. On her perfect face, for the first time in his life, he saw undisguised alarm and terror.

“They say she’s going to be all right.”

Kate paused with the lighted taper in her hand. “They being who?”

“Sylva Commensals. Apparently the death of one of the big schistosomes is rare, but it has happened before. They’ll take it out of Aunt Agatha, put in a replacement, and she’ll be as good as new.”

Kate lit the candle and blew out the taper. “They more or less have to say that, don’t they? Either things are fine, or else they admit there’s something fundamentally dangerous about becoming a Commensal.”

She had greeted Alex on his return with an explosive, “I’ve wondered and wondered. You’ve got to tell me everything.” More revealing than her words were her clothes and the condition of her apartment. She was wearing a tight pantsuit of powder blue, showing off her figure and enhancing the color of her eyes. The lights were dim, and a casserole was steaming in the kitchen oven. Where Alex would sit was a bottle of whiskey and a flagon of Callistan ice melt, drinks that he preferred to any wine in spite of Kate’s efforts to “educate” him. The table was decorated with candles, sprigs of ivy, and fronds of lady’s slipper. Alex, knowing that Kate was a great believer in the language of flowers, sneaked a look at a reference database while she was off removing the casserole from the oven. Sprig of ivy, with tendrils: assiduous to please. And Lady’s slipper: win me and wear me. Both of which suited him very well. He wasn’t going to mention the recent past if she didn’t.

“I think that being a Commensal may be dangerous,” he said. “I received some very odd visions about them when I was inside the predictive model.” He decided that was the right way to put it. He had been inside the model when it was running, and visions was a better word than facts. What he retained after he left the model was a great jumble of impressions, perhaps scrambled in time.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he went on. “After we left Sylva Commensals, Uncle Karolus did a funny little hop-step. ‘They’re in shit up to their necks and they can’t duck,’ he said. ‘We have recordings of the meeting, with Agatha walking like a lame crab and yellow as a banana. I’ll make sure that the pictures are with the media tomorrow — leaked, of course. We’ll insist we have no idea how they got out from Ligon Corporate.’ ”

“Dirty tactics.” Kate refilled Alex’s glass. “What did I tell you? Wherever you encounter gobs of money, you’ll find shady business methods to go with it.”

They were sitting opposite each other at the little table, small enough so that knee contact was inevitable. “All right,” Kate went on. “I don’t want just the high points. Give me details, the whole thing. Every second from the moment you arrived at Ligon Industries until you walked back in that door.”

It was a tall order, but Alex did his best. He ate a fair amount, drank a lot, and talked steadily while Kate sipped wine and listened in silence. She frowned once, when he said he hadn’t denied having sex with Lucy-Maria, or whoever else it might have been, on his disastrous night at the Holy Rollers”, but Kate clapped her hands with delight when he told her that he had recalled her advice, Screw your family. Give them hell, and described his own outburst.

“Bravo, Alex. Exactly what they deserved.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t do so well later. If it’s approved for me to take a few days leave I’m pretty much committed to trying to see this weirdo who hangs out on Pandora. I don’t want to do it, but I didn’t know how to say no.”

“Don’t give it a second thought. I’ll pass word up the line that your presence here is absolutely vital. Which it is.”

“I’m not sure. Prosper Ligon sounded pretty confident. He usually makes sure of his positions ahead of time.” Alex had another thought. He had covered everything from the time he arrived at Ligon Corporate, but not the period while he was traveling there. “Kate, I saw a news blurb while I was heading up for the meeting, about some sort of alien contact. It made me think of something similar in the predictive model. Have you heard anything about alien messages?”

“There was nothing on the standard channels.”

“There wouldn’t be. This was a Paradigm special.”

“Then it was more than likely garbage. Want me to check it out?”

“If you would.” Alex didn’t say, if you can. Kate could network in a way that he would never master. “Not now, though.”

“Certainly not now. Have you finished eating?”

“Yes.”

Kate rested her hand on the top of the bottle. “And drinking?”

“Not quite.” Alex realized that his head no longer ached. He felt good, physically and mentally. He took the bottle from her. “One more, for medicinal purposes. You know the origin of the word ‘whiskey’? It comes from usquebaugh, which meant ‘water of life.’ The old-timers back on Earth knew what they were talking about.”

“Just don’t drink too much. You know what another of your old-timers said about alcohol? ‘Liquor increases the desire but ruins the performance.’ ”

Which disposed of any question as to what would happen next. Kate might be worried, but she didn’t need to be. Beneath the table, Alex gripped her knee between his. This had been a long and multiply-horrible day, but the night would be better.

To borrow from more of the old-timers, all’s well that ends well. And then there was, Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet? Not to mention a lecherous head begets a lecherous tail.

He didn’t realize that he was speaking aloud until Kate reached out and very firmly removed the bottle from his hand. “When you start babbling quotations, it means you’ve had quite enough.”

“I’m feeling great.”

“That’s all right. Feeling great is allowed.” Kate put the bottle off on a side table and reached out a hand to raise Alex to his feet. “What isn’t allowed is Alex Ligon, tomorrow morning, telling me that he’s not sure who he had sex with tonight.”

18

The buzz was surely Magrit Knudsen, trying to reach him again. It would be about the infernal Ligon family, and Bat’s need to meet with them, but Bat had taken all the irritation he could stand for one day. He set a minimal data-rate line to the outside world, designed to infuriate and frustrate any human caller, and retreated into the safety and solitude of the Keep.

It was time to review the four-sigma list.

The list was prepared automatically by Bat’s own programs in their constant system-wide search for anomalies improbable enough to be flagged. The “four-sigma” designation was, as Bat well knew, misleading. It suggested that he was interested in items with only one chance in more than ten thousand of occurring, which was quite true. But the name also assumed that such events followed a normal distribution, which was surely not true.

Bat was too lazy to invent a better name. He knew what he wanted from the program and in any case the next step was all his, incapable of being quantified in any manner that he could describe. He sought connections between items on the four-sigma list, to multiply chances and turn a less than one in ten thousand probability into a one in three hundred million improbability.